Chimera-44 Read Free

Russian media would simply release a
bulletin stating that the ship was overdue in Jakarta 12 days later
and no follow up information was ever forthcoming. Again, for a
true Russian, the glass was always half empty.
     
    — | — | —
     
     

Chapter 2:
     
    The Ikan Hiu
     
     
    Abdurrahman, or simply Dur to his
friends, clung to a mat of broken wreckage atop the gently swaying
sea. He was getting too old for this robbery and killing routine.
He had spent the majority of his life as a simple fisherman, plying
the waters off Java for tuna and other huge pelagic fish. However,
foreign trawlers from China and India had destroyed the local fish
populations in the past decade. The giant factory ships had
vacuumed the ocean clean and left nothing for him to harvest to
feed his family. Then the Preman, organized crime bosses from the
city, had come to his village looking for local sailors who could
handle small boats and weren’t afraid of the sea. Men who needed
money to keep their family from starving and would do anything for
it. The next thing he knew, he was a member of a seagoing gang of
hijackers who crept aboard ships in the middle of the open ocean,
and hijacked the vessel.
    Typically, they raided the ships for
cash, robbing the crews of their personal belongings and rifling
through the ship’s cash box. If the cargo was anything valuable
they would hijack the ship, take it to an isolated inlet where the
local naval police were paid to look the other way, and ransom the
ship back to its owner for a sum of gold or foreign currency. It
paid the bills, and the fact that most often the ships were foreign
kept Dur from feeling bad about spending his cut.
    This hijacking had been so much more
different from all the others he had been a part. The bosses,
working on rumors they picked up in the bars of Jakarta, believed
the Russian ship was making a powerful new drug onboard. Whether it
was cancer cure, a new dick pill, or a cure for the shingles, it
simply didn’t matter. What did was capturing it and the researchers
working on it so they could ransom the ship back to its owners for
millions. The Preman gang had even imported a dozen former military
men with experience in Timor as shooters. Dur and his fellow
sailors were just bus drivers along for the ride.
    He shook seawater out of his ears in
the dark as a low wave lifted him and his pile of wreckage high
before ebbing back down. He yelled out into the dark but received
no reply.
    Everything had initially gone
according to plan on the attack. They had stalked the Russian ship
for days and waited until no other ship was visible for miles in
any direction. Then, with a calm sea, they crept toward the Russian
ship in small rubber boats from behind while their main ship
remained over the horizon. Dur and Haddam, his brother, landed with
the shooters who broke off into two groups, one to seize the
bridge, the other to capture the lab. Haddam had gone with the
bridge team and Dur, armed only with a chair leg, had accompanied
the second group to the lab. They had just made it in through the
series of complicated doors when the whole ship exploded around
them.
    Dur had ridden a column of rushing
water through a maze of passages and hatches, ever higher as the
ship sank under him. In the darkness he had found and fought a
monkey—of all things—who had clawed and bit his hands in the water
as they shot out on deck and found themselves alone in the ocean.
Dur knocked the cursed creature off a floating life ring and saw
its quizzical face, small and furry; sinking downward to the ship
that it had come from.
    “ Haddam!” he yelled into
the night repeatedly. He had promised his brother that this job
would help them leave this life. His brother had seven children and
a wife to support. Now they would certainly be added to Dur’s own
burden.
    For quite some time he floated alone
with only bits of wreckage and his own thoughts. He fought the urge
to cry, to feel self-pity for his